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Monday, May 6, 2013

A Baking Date with My Niece

Yesterday, my husband and I went over to my Mother-in-Law's place for lunch. My niece happened to be there too. When my husband and I were about to go home as I had a plan to bake a cake that afternoon, my niece sighed a bit. Then, I offered her to come over to our place and see me bake. She quickly said yes and my Mother-in-Law gave us the green light to bring the kid to my house.

In the car, she kept on mentioning that she wanted to bake cookies. Not cake.

Long story short, I took her instruction very well and changed my mind. It was like, "OK, kiddo! You win this time. Let's bake some cookies today!"

To make the whole experience fun, I thought of making some cookies that are easy to prepare so I could involve my niece instead of doing the whole thing myself.

Then, I decided to make dog cookies that I once baked because their shapes are so interesting for kids.

Before our baking frenzy began, I sent my husband and niece to go to a nearby supermarket to get some koko krunch as I had no idea how to substitute the dogs' ears without using koko krunch. Whilst both of them were away for koko krunch, I started measuring the cookies' ingredients and tending to Baby Naomi at home.

About half an hour later, they're back from supermarket. I handed Baby Naomi over to my husband so I could whip the cookies' dough. It took me about 5 minutes to make the cookies dough. Once I was done with it, I quickly called my niece to start decorating the cookies with me.

In the beginning, she's in charge for decorating the dog's face in the cookies - the eyes, nose and ears. Not long, I realized that putting really tiny chocolate rice to a mini cookie dough ball for a kindergarten kid is like asking her to find the measurement of third side of a triangle using a Phytagorean theorem. Too difficult. She made the dog faces in the cookies look like they just got some serious industrial accident in the eyes - one eye was big, the other was small; both eyes were too far away from each other or way too centred.

Soon, she gave up doing the dogs' eyes and I asked her to place the dogs' nose and ears only.

Let the fun begin!

Anyway, I can tell that she had so much fun decorating all the cookies because she could not stop smiling from ear to ear when we're making the cookies yesterday.

We're ready to bake these cookies now!

After the cookies were baked, despite my warning that the cookies were still hot as I just took them out from the oven, my niece already munched like 3 of them.

My niece attacking the first batch of the dog cookies.

Our Sunday's masterpiece.

Once the cookies were not too hot any more, I packed some cookies for my niece to bring home and share with her sisters. I asked her to choose the cookies that she wanted to bring home. I think she mostly chose the cookies with dogs' faces that had more characters like sleepy, sad, angry and such instead of those which had almost perfect faces.

About an hour later, my brother-in-law came to pick my niece up and she happily hopped onto her Dad's car carrying her cookies inside the plastic containers.